‘Hello,’ said the man.
He was flanked by a much smaller man with a boom microphone on a pole and a much larger man with a camera on his left shoulder, the muscles in which were visibly bigger than those in his right shoulder.
‘Are you Malcolm Ede?’ he continued.
I recognised him from the local news on television. His name was Ray Darling. His hair was a combed into a side-parting straightened with mathematical precision but it was obvious that he wasn’t wearing a toupée. Mal owed me five pounds.
‘No, I’m not.’
‘So you must be Malcolm Ede’s brother?’ he said.
It was the first time I was ever asked that question in that way.
‘Yes. Yes, I am.’
He raised an eyebrow to a right angle, offering it to me. Now we’re friends.
‘We hear that Malcolm is involved in some kind of protest?’ he said.
Protest. I’d not thought of it as that. Sometimes around Malcolm I could barely think at all.
‘No.’
‘Can we come in?’
(He starts off kindly.)
‘No.’
‘Are your parents here?’
‘No.’
‘Your mother is.’
(He changes direction.)
‘How do you know?’
‘What is it then?’
‘What?’
(He confuses you.)
‘We hear that your brother is refusing to get out of bed.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What is he doing?’
(A hard question, followed by a harder one . . .)
‘Please.’
‘And more importantly, why is he doing it?’
(. . . there it is.)
‘I don’t know, now please . . .’
‘People are talking . . .’
(Just like on the television.)
I slammed the door hard. Through its bulk I heard Ray Darling force his mute colleagues to agree that this house, our house, was a house full of ‘fucking weirdoes’. The very same Ray Darling that looks like he is wearing a wig even though he’s not.
46
On the news the next evening there was a war. There was a politician’s deathly sex game. There was a strike at the fire station. There were some football fans feeling aggrieved because a team from their local area had been beaten by a team from a different area. There was a woman who was famous but nobody knew why. There were predictions about humidity, a brief problem with the sound and a deaf man doing sign language in a shirt that fitted too tightly.
And then there was a piece at the end.
‘Malcolm Ede . . .’ said Ray Darling.
‘That is definitely a wig,’ said Mal.
It wasn’t. I had seen it up close. He owed me five pounds. Ray Darling’s face shone like a great pumpkin lantern.
‘. . . hasn’t got of bed for a whole year, according to local sources. As yet no one in the Ede household has been able to comment on what his motives are. He is not believed to be ill.’
They showed footage taken from over the garden fence, of Mum trimming Mal’s toenails the night before. She stopped eating the meal on her lap. The blood drained from her.
‘Jesus fucking Christ . . .’ came the call from the attic. ‘Did you just see that?’
The entire house seemed to buzz, as though the light of the sun were focused upon a pin-sized spot of it. Dad even descended, albeit temporarily. He looked at Mal, turned to me and said simply, ‘Who?’
It wasn’t Lou, I told him. We hadn’t heard from her for months. I’d tried to visit her at her house. Her dad had told me she’d gone away but I could still smell her perfume in the entrance to her home, even above the scent of his cigars.
‘Mrs Gee,’ croaked Mum, her knife and fork still equidistant between plate and mouth. ‘Mrs Gee.’
Mrs Gee knew our business. Mrs Gee loved to talk. I imagined her watching the news, thinking If only I were Ray Darling’s age, her hips creaking like a trapdoor.
47
Day Seven Thousand Four Hundred and Eighty-Three, according to the display on the wall.
I sit in the corner, still toying with my shoes, not thinking about the pain or the metal in my legs but thinking of going to meet Lou. For weeks Mal’s interview had been all that had occupied the muddled space in my thoughts but now she pulled my eyes elsewhere.
There had been three thousand or more media requests before. Every day they would clog the answering machine, hair in a drain. Over the years they had become more frequent, swelling in direct proportion to Mal’s epidermis. Television companies from across Europe and America would lavish us with praise and gifts to try and secure exclusive rights to his story. The wolf-eyed representatives of tabloid newspapers would arrive with suitcases full of money in return for Mal’s words but Dad would turn them down with the shake of a finger and a closing of the trailer door. In response they would scattergun that cash, buying rumours and lazy old lies from those that professed to know us. On a regular basis, the day after their rejection would come front-page splashes of salacious old nonsense, all of it a variation on something printed in the same newspaper a few weeks before.
Someone once told us that when a story about Mal was splurged across the front of a magazine it sold a third more copies. I obviously had nothing at all in common with the vast majority of the general public. Second cousins we’d never met would appear on daytime chat shows or trashy magazines, talking of how Mal would seem whenever they came to visit. Liars. Weeks later they would be spotted parking a brand-new car in the centre of town, their infant children in dirty shirts, sucking on hyperactive fluorescent lollipops.
Still, in the house we felt safe. Closed off.
Not today though, Day Seven Thousand Four Hundred and Eighty-Three, according to the display on the wall. Today was special, because Mal had agreed after all these years to allow a news crew into the house.
Mum pulls the fresh sheets of the bed up over Mal’s body, stopping short of the final tug above the face that denotes a passing. The medics are gone, the psychiatrists too. The room is tidy, the bed made. Mum is in her best dress (a pink number she’s had for more than fifteen years, with padding in the shoulders and oversized pretend flowers soiling the front) and Mal is tingling with the prickly heat of nerves. I look out of the window and see how unsuitably calm the weather is. The sun is shining outside. It doesn’t feel like the day of a grand denouement. Those days are windswept and plagued by rain. This isn’t the weather for something incredible.
After an hour of waiting, there is an unfamiliar knock on the door. I get up to answer it. I slowly pull the handle back to be met with the older, ever-more-orange face of Ray Darling. He looks like he’s been painted with the sealant used to protect wooden fence posts from the elements. With him are a cameraman and a sound technician, the same two from all those years before. He waltzes straight past me towards Mum, who stands at the end of the hall outside the bedroom that grows inside the house like a baby in the womb. He clasps her small, blue-veined hands in his monstrously hairy fingers and kisses her on the cheek. The sound of his lips meeting her face feels like a chop to my windpipe. A large blue badge on the lapel of his blazer catches on Mum’s cheap embroidery and brings them together with a not-unfunny awkwardness. His badge says ‘Ray Darling!’. It has an exclamation mark on it.
‘Please, go through,’ she says, gesturing towards the door after detaching herself with a blush. So begins an event.
As Ray Darling and his team set up the equipment around Mal, making the bedroom into a black operating theatre, they make pleasantries. Mum makes tea and Mal makes no effort whatsoever. Edged out of the room, I take the keys to the trailer from Mum’s handbag and slip quietly through the front door, where the atmosphere is high. People have been gathering for hours but not one of them notices me emerge.
There are maybe a hundred people standing and waiting. Today could be the day they’d find out if they were righ
t or wrong. When the bookies who have revelled in Mal’s cause célèbre will make or lose their money. When a hero’s status is confirmed or when a disappointment is unleashed that will rival ten thousand badly-planned New Year’s Eve parties.
I walk the short distance up the shaky metal steps into the trailer and close the door, locking it behind me. From out of the crowd, suddenly I am totally alone.
I switch on the television. Ray Darling’s fluorescent face flickers and then shines.
48
Fulsome beads of sweat map Mal’s emotionless face. On television he looks even bigger. His arms appear as bags of salt swollen to splitting. The physical stress of the occasion makes it too much for him to even hold his mouth closed. The lighting makes the insides of his cheeks glisten as the spit runs down them. His eyes are dustbowls, sunk back into his face like on the ugliest of dogs. Inside and outside the trailer is a silence and only the whirr of the camera zooming in on Mal’s flabby face, played through speakers an industrious neighbour had hung from his window, mean anyone is sure that their ears are working. And then Ray Darling speaks. His voice sounds thicker and more rounded than it does in person. That’s what television does.
‘Hello, ladies and gentlemen,’ he says, and for the first time I am part of the world looking in, rapt.
‘I’m Ray Darling, and soon I’m going to be talking live, exclusively, to Malcolm Ede. Since his decision not to get out of bed on his twenty-fifth birthday over twenty years ago, Malcolm has grown to weigh over a hunded stone. He has captured the imagination of all who hear his story. But the question is why? Why did this normal . . .’
Hardly.
‘. . . twenty-five-year-old take a decision to end what normal life he had? Why is Malcolm Ede in bed? Join me after this short break to find out, for the first time.’
An ice cream dessert.
Microwave meals.
Do-it-yourself mini sandwich snacks with processed cheeses for lazy parents to slot into the lunchboxes of children with limited palates.
All advertisements for food. Clever.
‘Welcome back. You join me in Malcolm Ede’s bedroom. Hello, Malcolm.’
Mal blinks slothfully. He swallows and it lasts a lifetime. His appearance is greeted by enormous cheers outside that tremor through the glass and into the microphone dangling above him to be blasted through the speakers and back out with a bass tone into the crowd from which they came. He doesn’t answer. I grip my own hand, pinch the fingertips, look around the trailer for something to clench and find an apple. I break its skin.
‘How are you today?’
No answer. Ray Darling’s lips slowly nosedive down his chin.
‘OK . . . well, the question everyone is asking is, of course, why?’
Mal’s mute face fills every screen.
‘Malcolm?’
Ray Darling’s badge tilts at an angle so that you can’t read it without turning your head ninety degrees to the left.
‘Malcolm? Why did you decide not to get out of bed?’
Mal breathes out slowly, like a blimp deflating with a pinprick.
‘Are you going to speak to me, Malcolm?’ says Ray.
This really hurts. And then suddenly relief, a great wash of relief.
‘Mr Darling,’ says Mal.
A studied pause, nice.
‘Please, call me Ray . . .’
A smile, some vindication.
‘Mr Darling,’ says Mal.
It’s so beautiful, my head aches.
‘Yes?’
‘May I ask you a question?’
‘Of course, Malcolm. Of course.’
This feels like the centre of the world, the start, the pop before the biggest bang.
A pause. A beat.
‘Are you wearing a wig?’
49
The laughter outside is uproarious. It reverberates around the silver skin of Norma Bee’s trailer, making the china plates vibrate on the plastic kitchen surfaces like chattering winter teeth. With the corners of my sleeves I dab away the tears of laughter that outline the shape of my nose and I think about how much Norma would have loved what Mal just did to Ray Darling on live television.
The excitement is such that not a solitary figure in the crowd gathered outside the front of the house notices me slip surreptitiously from the door of the trailer and into the bustling marketplace of commotion they’ve created. I lock the door behind me and stand there, surveying the moment. Then I feel a huge friendly hand on my shoulder. I turn to see a man whose face I recognise. He has been here before. A few times I’d woken to his face pressed against the window. Looking at Mal’s stomach. Looking at the pins that pierce my legs. His fingernails are yellow and cracked and home to small semi-circles of dirt and mud from the grass. His hair is long, matted mazes, confused and tangled and greasy. His skin is a sun-wrinkled suitcase leather. He looks and smells and moves like the outdoors. Even his breath smells like outside, like air and peat and grime that wriggles with life inside it.
‘Hey, man,’ he says.
‘Hello,’ I say.
‘You’re Malcolm’s brother, right?’
‘Yes.’
He smiles a green-toothed grin.
‘Wow. Did you see the interview?’
‘Yes.’
He looks at my legs.
And then he asks me a question. A flurry of hits, a combination of blows.
‘Why did you come back from America just to live in that room with him?’
Slowly heated needles pushed quickly through my heart. Every bad memory I’ve ever forgotten jammed onto a hook and dragged backwards through my brain.
‘That’s not why I came back. Look,’ I say, polite but pretend, a robot butler. ‘I’d love to stop and talk with you but I have to go inside now.’
‘No problem, man.’ He grins a toothless, graveyard smile.
With my eyes to the floor I trot through the crowd, mapping the pathway until I am at the front door, which I shut behind me, hoping that the amount of people outside will have diminished by the time I have to go and meet Lou later tonight. I think that I am back in the bubble, and I think that the peace is inside it but I am wrong. Raised voices crackle through the plaster in the walls and skim off the glass in the windows. Volumes of mighty anger, panic and fretting. I slowly, with the tip of my longest finger and the sense of a bigger dread, push open the small wooden door between me and the racket.
Ray Darling is clinging to Mal’s left elephant ankle with both hands, his fingertips leaving deep indentations in the chunky flesh sheath of it. His cameraman and soundman pull with all their strength at his belt, trying to drag him away, but his wrath is too great and suspended between them and Mal it’s as though he grips for dear life to an immovable lamppost in a hurricane. His face is burgundy, his eyes bloodshot, and he shouts jets of vengeance. They are so loud that they lapse in and out of sense.
‘How fucking dare you! How dare you!’ he screams, tearing the sheet on Mal’s body to the floor. Despite the best efforts of his two larger sidekicks, Ray Darling is slowly clawing his way up Mal’s wobbling, quivering frame. ‘Make a fucking monkey out of me!’ he roars, his hands dug deep into Mal’s belly as though he were digging his way through a pile of warm clay. ‘Bastard! Bastard! You great, fat, horrible bastard!’
I see Mal break sweat, unable to move, the vast hundred-stone umbrella of fat that covers him pinning him to the bed. I picture Ray straddling Mal, leaning down and biting off his stubby nose. I imagine him splashed with Mal’s blood, it dripping in thick red jewels from his mouth as Mal, underneath him, suffers a massive heart attack that judders through him, flushing out the remains of life.
Mum is wailing. She has accidentally hooked her foot through the dense nest of wires between Mal’s machinery and the television equipment that has been set up for the broadcast. I watch as her feet become mummified with cable and in a great flurry she is brought crashing to the floor, grabbing and tearing down the curtains leading to the f
ront lawn, where by now a small throng of spectators remain, drawn back by the din.
They peer in through the glass. Mum wrapped in curtains and brightly coloured wire. Mal, enormous, naked, terrified. Ray Darling, clinging to the heavy flaps under Mal’s armpits, spewing vicious obscenities at my brother, his tormentor. Two fully grown men unable to stop him. Me and Dad, bemused, only now springing into action.
Dad jostles for position with the soundman in order to get at the legs of Ray Darling. I wrap both my arms around his neck as though I were squeezing him python-like to his death. The four of us holding him and still he scraps. Then there is a tearing sound as Dad attempts to haul him away from Mal by the back pockets of his trousers, ripping them off to reveal a skinny, hairy pair of legs and a discoloured off-white pair of underpants, which finally saps the fight from Ray Darling and presents me with an opportunity to settle this once and for all.
Dad lets two policemen in to find Ray Darling, exhausted and in his dirtiest underwear, lying spread-eagled atop the naked blob of a hundred-stone man as I pull the toupée from his nasty orange head.
As Ray is arrested, Mum puts the curtains back up. Mal’s laughter sends currents bubbling through his soft juicy pulp.
50
One year in, a circling of the sun, Mal was twenty-six. I watched him digging through a birthday toffee pie and ice cream. His head seemed to hang too loosely on his neck. It was eight in the morning. Mum brought in a great silver sack full of presents that left cheap silver glitter twinkling on the bed, all dry and dusty, the way you’d imagine the surface of the planet Mercury. There were chocolates and socks and things women buy men without interests. And there was a long, rectangular package, about the size of a case you’d keep a snooker cue in. I perched on the edge of my bed, my legs thrown over it, feet hovering just above the floor as though a dummy across the lap of a ventriloquist. And I watched. That he could bear to open a present so slowly and carefully carved cute little nicks in my impatience. Eventually, having opened one end of the gift, he slid it out of its Christmassy holding like he was removing a thigh-length leather boot from his leg.
Bed Page 11
